


familiar domesticity

by damnmysterytome



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Karen patches up Frank
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-05
Updated: 2016-04-05
Packaged: 2018-05-31 08:48:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,187
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6463627
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/damnmysterytome/pseuds/damnmysterytome
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Inside her bathroom is Frank Castle sitting on the edge of her bathtub while he tries to stitch up a cut on his arm. She’d been allowing him to use her bathroom and her new apartment as a home base to come back to (which he only agreed to after he replaced the windows with better glass and an actual security system) so it wasn’t an unusual sight to come home to a bloody Frank in her bathroom. It was unusual, however, to see him having so much trouble.</p>
            </blockquote>





	familiar domesticity

“Son of a bitch.” “Goddammit!” “Fuck!”

Karen wakes up to loud curses from her bathroom and for a second she’s petrified and reaching for the handgun in her nightstand when she recognizes the voice. It’s Frank. She sighs in relief and drops her hand from the nightstand, sitting up and pushing her blankets away from her body. There’s more cursing as she climbs out of bed and walks over to her bathroom, covering her face with a yawn.

Inside her bathroom is Frank Castle sitting on the edge of her bathtub while he tries to stitch up a cut on his arm. She’d been allowing him to use her bathroom and her new apartment as a home base to come back to (which he only agreed to after he replaced the windows with better glass and an actual security system) so it wasn’t an unusual sight to come home to a bloody Frank in her bathroom. It was unusual, however, to see him having so much trouble.

“Frank?” Karen mumbles sleepily, squinting in the bright light of her bathroom.

Frank glances up and realizes that he’s woken Karen up and he mumbles a barely audible ‘Sorry, ma'am’, but Karen shrugs her shoulders to dismiss him.

“Having some issues?” She asks, coming towards him. When she’s close enough, she can see that Frank is shaking and she doesn’t ask. If Frank needs to talk about it, he will.

“Damn hand won’t stop fucking shaking, I’m about ready to chop it off.” Frank gives up and drops the needle and thread back in the first aid kid in between his legs. The stitches in his arm are horribly done and it’s even snagged part of his skin that didn’t even need to be done.

Karen is probably the only person who can laugh at The Punisher and not at least get hit. She laughs as she turns around to her sink and turns on the water. “Gonna get a chainsaw and stick it on there?” Karen jokes as she stops by her sink to splash her face with water. “That’ll really scare all the bad guys.”

Frank looks up at Karen as she running a dry towel over her face to wipe her face off. “What?”

She pulls the towel down from her face and there’s a genuinely shocked look on her face. “Seriously? You’ve never seen Evil Dead 2?” Karen says as she walks over to Frank and nudges his leg until he’s scooting back to make room for Karen.

“Not really a fan of movies.” Karen rolls her eyes at Frank as she steps completely into the tub and sits cross legged on her bath mat. “If you’re going to keep making my bathtub look like a crime scene, the least you could do is indulge me.”

Frank makes some kind of noise that Karen takes as a confirmation that he’ll watch the movie. “Face me.” Karen says and without hesitation, he turns his whole body so that both legs are in the tub next to her. She’s probably the only one who can order him around and Frank will follow each command. Karen picks up a pair of small scissors and snips the thread and slowly pulls out what Frank’s done to himself. “Cleaned this already, right?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

Karen props her legs up to rest Frank’s arm on her bare legs and she picks up the needle and thread. After rethreading the needle, Karen slowly begins to work on his arm. The gash is almost the length of his forearm and is red with irritation and blood. A few months ago, this would have disgusted Karen. She doesn’t blink at it now. “When’s the last time you ate something?”

“I ate today.”

“When?”

“What does it matter?”

Karen looks up over her work and gives Frank a pointed stare. “You’re not leaving my apartment without having something to eat.” Frank doesn’t argue with her, he knows it’s pointless. When he changes the subject and asks about her day, Karen knows that something awful must have happened tonight.

“Wasn’t that good. The coffee shop I normally go to messed up my order three different times.”

“Well, if you’d stop ordering complicated ass coffee -”

Karen ignores Frank and goes on about her day, telling him about the article she’s working on, about lunch with Foggy, about how she swears she saw Matt following her earlier in the day. She found out weeks ago that Frank knows who Matt is at night, he recognized his voice in court. She tells him just about everything that happened in her day, and by the time she’s done talking she’s done with the stitches and Frank’s just barely shaking.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Karen asks, running her finger along the spot next to his stitches. She looks up at Frank and for a moment she thinks he might tell her, but he shakes his head. “Okay.” Karen moves his arm tenderly and stands to her feet. She bends over a bit to clean up the first aid kit before getting out of the tub to return it to its place under the sink.

“Hey.” Frank says as she starts to leave the bathroom. Karen stops at the door and turns back to look at Frank, her hand and hip pressing against the door frame. He clears his throat before talking. “Can I .. Can I..”

Karen smiles as Frank tries to stumble through asking her if he can stay and Karen interrupts him to put him out of his misery. “Yeah.” Frank looks relieved that he didn’t actually have to ask. “There’s some of your less bloody clothes in the closet.”

Frank climbs out of the bathtub and leaves the bathroom while Karen heads towards the kitchen. He walks into her bedroom and opens her closet, which is (of course, he thinks) organized obsessively. Her jackets are in the back, her dresses next, her skirts, then blouses, then pants. And to top it all off – they’re color coordinated. Frank almost feels like messing them all up, if it wasn’t so impressive. He bends down and picks up the bag of clothes he’d stashed there and finds a clean t-shirt and a pair of pants.

Frank takes the clothes to the bathroom and leaves the door open while he strips his armor and clothes off, tossing the clothes in the bathtub. He knows that, despite his insistence that he’ll do it, Karen will end up scrubbing the blood out of the clothes while he naps on her couch. Frank uses a rag from the drawer to scrub dirt and blood from his arms and chest before pulling the t-shirt over his head and putting on the sweat pants. It feels weird to just be wearing sweat pants.

When Frank comes out to the kitchen, Karen’s heating up food on the stove and there’s a pot of coffee brewing. His lips almost turn up into a smile at the domesticity of the situation. He needs it after the night he’s had – but he wouldn’t admit it. “What’s, uh, what’s movie called?”

  
  


 


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